My Longkang

A continuation from Part 3

It was about 2 a.m. when Ah San finally reached his home. He remembered he was so afraid he stained his trousers as he waited for nightfall to come before he dared move. After that he waited some more.

The execution!

He could hardly breathe but he clung on to life. Even when the Japanese soldiers were prodding the victims he grit his teeth and pretended to be dead.

The streets were deserted. Whenever he could, he avoided the streets so he made it back through farmland and gardens. He mentioned something about passing through York Road area although I didn’t make sense of it.

Once he was seen by some people ( present day Trang Road area ), somewhere behind present day Gama Supermarket…. but he was just a boy after all, so they didnt pay much notice to him anyway.

His arrival home was greeted by tears as his sister had thought he was already dead. He didn’t make any noise as the sister nursed his wounds. His sister joked with me once when Ah San is sick, he will whine and moan but he will never die referring to that incident.

For a few weeks after that he lay low and didn’t dare move out of the house. Looking back he said the Japanese probably had written him off and were no longer interested in him. It was a terrifying period for him.

He skipped a few years and talked about the years after the war. He had met a man who was selling wooden clogs. He was paid a fraction of a cent for every pair of wooden clogs sold. During that period there were still a lot of surviving servant girls or Ah Sam . They originated from China and wore long pleated pig-tails. Their customary garb was long black trousers and long sleeved blouses with sam foo features. To top it off they almost always wore wooden clogs.

Wooden clogs were fashionable because they could wear it in the kitchen, to go to the toilet or even go to the wet markets. Many ladies wore it too for the convenience. It is basically a chunk of wood cut into the shape of clogs and rubber strips to be nailed into the wood to hold the foot.

For some time, Ah San accompanied his boss through the streets of china town. The modus operandi was always simple. “Clog!Clogs!”, or “Ka kiak”, as in hockien, Ah san would shout every day until a customer stops him. Then he would remove a wooden stool from the carrier of the bicycle. The lady would then sit on the stool.

She would then put her feet on the clogs. Ah San would then use a rubber strip and nail one side twice before nailing the other side twice. Instant wooden clogs!

This was cumbersome and took a lot of time. Once he hit a woman’s foot by mistake. I looked at Ah San as he said this and seeing the twinkle in the old man’s eyes, I immediately suspected he was pulling my leg about the woman’s foot

Anyway, he proposed to his boss that one side of the rubber be nailed in first before they left for work. From then on, he only had to nail the other side of the rubber strip on site. This saved time and the ladies didn’t have to wait for such a long time.

For this, he was given a pay raise.

To be continued ……..….